Owners of portal web pages wish to make their pages appealing to potential visitors. One way of making a portal page more enticing to those potential visitors is by placing interesting information on that portal page. For example, one might try to entice users to access a portal page by including, on the portal page, interesting and current content items such as news stories, advertisements, pertinent search results, or media. Such content items may be presented in conjunction with one another, or separately. Furthermore, there may be a substantive representation of the content item directly on the portal page, or the portal page may contain only a link with minimal information about the item.
If visitors to the portal page learn, by experience, that the content shown on the portal page is likely to be of interest to those visitors, and that the content shown on the portal page is likely to be dynamic, updated, fresh, and current each time that those visitors access the portal page, then those visitors will likely want to access that page additional times in the future, and with greater frequency. Also, the dynamic nature of the portal page will enhance the experience of the visitors.
Alternatively, if visitors to the portal page discover, by experience, that the content shown on the portal page is likely to be the same static content that those visitors saw the last time that they visited the portal page, or if visitors to the portal page come to understand that the type of content that is shown on the portal page is a type of content in which they are not interested, then those visitors become more likely, in the future, to forego visiting the portal page and visit other pages instead.
One challenge to the owner or the maintainer of the portal page becomes how to choose, from among the multitude of content that could be presented on the portal page, content that is likely to increase visitor interest in the page. One approach for selecting content might involve hiring a staff of full-time human editors to look for (and/or compile or otherwise produce) news stories and other content items that those editors believe will be interesting to those who visit the portal page. However, such editors are only human, and, as humans, are inherently biased towards their own tastes and preferences. The content that appeals to the editors might not be content that appeals to significant segments of the public. Additionally, a staff of qualified full-time editors can require a significant and recurring monetary investment on the part of the owners of the Internet portal page to maintain or to scale.
Another approach for selecting content for presentation on the portal page is through an automated system. These automated systems are easier to scale and maintain than the staff of editors. The systems generally base content selection on historical information gathered from users of the portal page. For example, automated systems can rely on past user behavior including search queries that were previously entered, advertisements that visitors have clicked on, or information that visitors explicitly give to the portal page. However, such historical data does not always accurately reflect the current trends and desires of the visitors to the portal page. Also, because content for web pages can change very rapidly, the historical data may not include information about the content currently available to display.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.